This proposal below is from the MADISON CITY EXPRESS on April 25th 1844. The proposal is to build the lighthouse for $4,000.
This information below is from "SEEING THE LIGHT", Lighthouses of the Western Great Lakes. Link below.
In 1838, Lieutenant James T Homans, to whom responsibility for the lighthouses of the Northern Great Lakes fell at the time, sailed up the lakes to locate appropriate sites for a number of new lighthouses for which appropriations had been authorized the previous year. Arriving at Grassy Island, Homans was dismayed with what he found, reporting the island to be "unsuitable for construction of buildings upon it of any durability, and totally uninhabitable by a keeper, being nearly under water, from the great rise of the lake, since the recommendation for a light upon it was made." Searching for an alternate location for the Light, Homans recommended that the light instead be established on Tail Point, a peninsula lying a short distance north of Grassy Island, with both higher and ground and blessed by the local mariners with whom he spoke during his visit.
Fox River business interests were not easily dissuaded, and continued to apply pressure for the establishment of a lighthouse on Grassy Island. After the Legislature of the Territory of Wisconsin passed a resolution in favor of establishing a light on Grassy Island, the Governor of the Wisconsin Territory even convinced Vice President Mifflin Douglas and Speaker John Wesley Davis to go before the Senate and House respectively on February 1, 1846 to plead their case. While the matter was referred to the Commerce Committee, and a bill subsequently passed approving the establishment of the station on July 2, 1846, no appropriation was made. Thus the Lighthouse Board moved ahead with construction of the Tail Point light station, and it appeared that the matter of a light on Grassy Island was dead.
"SEEING THE LIGHT", Lighthouses of the Western Great Lakes
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